“Bury a man?” He was appalled.
“His name was Quincy Ralph Simpson. He was found buried in Citrus Junction last week, with an icepick wound in his heart. Did you know him?”
“I never heard of him, honest. Besides, we’ve had the coat for a couple of months.” His voice had regressed five years, and sounded as though it was changing all over again. He turned to the girl. “Isn’t that right, Mona?”
She nodded. Her sea-lion eyes were wide and scared. With scrabbling fingers she unbuttoned the coat and flung it off. I held out my hands for it. Ray Buzzell picked it up and gave it to me. His movements had lost their certainty.
The coat was heavy, with matted fibers that smelled of the sea. I folded it over my arm.
“Where did you get it, Ray?”
“On the beach, like Moth– like the old lady said. It was salvage, like. I’m always living off the beach, picking up salvage and jetsam. Isn’t that right, Mona?”
She nodded, still without breaking silence.
His voice rushed on in an adolescent spate: “It was soaked through, and there were stones in the pockets, like somebody chunked it in the drink to get rid of it. But there was a strong tide running, and the waves washed it up on the beach. It was still in pretty good condition, this Harris tweed is indestructible, so I decided to dry it out and keep it. It was like salvage. Mona wears it mostly – she’s the one that gets cold.”
She was shivering in her bathing suit now, close by the fire. The other girl draped a plaid shirt over her shoulders. The boys were standing around desultorily, like figures relaxing out of a battle frieze.
“Can you name the beach?”
“I don’t remember. We go to a lot of beaches.”
“I know which one it was,” Mona said. “It was the day we had the six-point-five and I was scared to go out in them and you all said I was chicken. You know,” she said to the others, “that little private beach above Malibu where they have the shrimp joint across the highway.”
“Yeah,” Ray said. “We ate there the other day. Crummy joint.”
“I saw you there the other day,” I said. “Now let’s see if we can pin down the date you found the coat.”
“I don’t see how. That was a long time ago, a couple months.”
The girl rose and touched his arm. “What about the tide tables, Raybuzz?”
“What about them?”
“We had a six-point-five tide that day. We haven’t had many this year. You’ve got the tide tables in the car, haven’t you?”
“I guess so.”
The three of us went up the beach to the zebra-striped hearse. Ray found the dog-eared booklet, and Mona scanned it under the dashboard lights.
“It was May the nineteenth,” she said positively. “It couldn’t have been any other day.”
I thanked her. I thanked them both, but she was the one with the brains. As I drove back toward Los Angeles, I wondered what Mona was doing on the beach. Perhaps if I met her father or her mother I could stop wondering.
24
THE BLACKWELL HOUSE was dark. I pressed the bell push, and the chimes inside gave out a lonely tinkling. I waited and rang again and waited and rang and waited.
Eventually I heard footsteps inside. The veranda light went on over my head, and the little maid looked out at me sleepily. She was out of uniform and out of sorts.
“What do you want?”
“Are the Blackwells in?”
“She is. He isn’t.”
“Tell her Mr. Archer would like to speak to her.”
“I can’t do that. She’s in bed asleep. I was asleep myself.” She yawned in my face, and hugged her rayon bathrobe more closely around her.
“You go to bed early, Letty.”
“I had to get up early this morning, so I thought I might as well catch up on my rest. Mrs. Blackwell took some sleeping pills and left strict orders not to be disturbed. She went to bed right after dinner.”
“Is Mrs. Blackwell all right?”
“She said she had a blinding headache but she gets those from time to time.”
“How many sleeping pills did she take?”
“A couple.”
“What kind?”
“The red kind. Why?”
“Nothing. Where’s the lord and master?”
“He left early this morning. He had a phone call, about Miss Harriet, and he made me get up and make breakfast for him. It isn’t a regular part of my duties but the cook sleeps out–”
I cut in on her explanations: “Do you know where he is now?”
“He went up to Tahoe to help them search for her body. That’s where the phone call was from.”
“They haven’t found her, then?”
“No. What do you think happened to her?”
“I think she’s in the lake.”
“That’s what he said.” She stepped outside, partly closing the door behind her. “He was in bad shape at breakfast. He couldn’t eat he was so broken up. I didn’t think he should go off there by himself. But he wouldn’t let me wake up Mrs. Blackwell, and what could I do?”
She crossed the veranda and looked up at the stars. She sighed, and laid a hand on her round pink rayon bosom.
“How long have you been working for the Blackwells?”
“Two months. It seems like longer. I mean with all the trouble in the house.”
“Trouble between Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell?”
“They’ve had their share. But it don’t behoove me to talk about it.”
“Don’t they get along?”
“They get along as well as most, I guess. A-course they’ve only been married eight or nine months. It’s the long pull that counts, my daddy says, and the Colonel must be twenty years older than her.”
“Is that an issue between the Blackwells?”
“No, I don’t mean that. Only it makes you wonder why she married him. Mrs. Blackwell may have her faults, but she’s not the gold-digging type.”
“I’m interested in what you think of her and her faults.”
“I don’t talk behind people’s backs,” she said with some spirit. “Mrs. Blackwell treats me good, and I try to treat her good back. She’s a nice lady to work for. He isn’t so bad either.”
“Did they take you up to Tahoe in May?”
“That was before I started with them. Just my luck. They were talking about going up again in September, but it’s probably all off now. They wouldn’t want to stay in the lodge so soon after what happened there. I wouldn’t want to myself.”
“Were you fond of Harriet?”
“I wouldn’t say that. I never saw much of her. But I felt kind of sorry for her, even before this happened. She was a real sad cookie, even with all that money. It’s too bad she had to die before she had any happiness in life. She put on a pretty good front, but you ought to seen the crying tantrums she threw in the privacy of her own room. My mother is a practical nurse, and I tried to calm her down a couple of times.”
“What was she crying about?”
“Nobody loved her, she said. She said she was ugly. I told her she had a real nice figure and other attractive features, but she couldn’t see it. This was in June, before she went to Mexico. It’s easy to understand why she was such a pushover for that artist guy – the one with all the names that murdered her.” She looked at the stars again, and coughed at their chilliness. “I think I’m catching cold. I better get back to bed. You never can tell when they’ll get you up around here.”
She went back into the dark house. I went down the hill and turned left on Sunset toward my office. I drove automatically in the light evening traffic. My mind was sifting the facts I’d scraped together, the facts and the semi-facts and the semi-demi-semi-facts. One of the semi-facts had become a certainty since I’d learned that the tweed coat had been found near the Blackwells’ beach house: the Blackwell case and the Dolly Campion case and the Ralph Simpson case were parts of one another. Dolly and Ralph and probably Harriet had died by the same hand, and the coat could be used to identify the hand.